Intractable policy failure: the case of bovine TB and badgers

The failure to eliminate bovine TB from the English and Welsh cattle herd represents a long-term intractable policy failure. Cattle-to-cattle transmission of the disease has been underemphasised in the debate compared with transmission from badgers despite a contested evidence base. Archival evidence shows that mythical constructions of the badger have shaped the policy debate. Relevant evidence was incomplete and contested; alternative framings of the policy problem were polarised and difficult to reconcile; and this rendered normal techniques of stakeholder management through co-option and mediation of little assistance

Ecology good, aut-ecology better; Improving the sustainability of designed plantings

© 2015 European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS). This paper explores how contemporary ecological science, and aut-ecology in particular, can improve the sustainability of designed vegetation. It is proposed that ecological understanding can be applied to design at three levels: 1) as representation, 2) as process, and 3) as aut-ecology, representing a gradient from the least to the most profound. Key ecological interactions that determine the success of designed plantings are explored via a review of relevant ecological research, challenging some widely held but unhelpful constructs about how both semi-natural and designed vegetation actually function. The paper concludes that there are real benefits to integrating aut-ecological understanding in the design of vegetation at all scales but that this will require ecological theory to be taught as a design toolkit rather than largely as descriptive knowledge

High-throughput, pan-leukocyte biomarkers for the detection of inflammation in human breastmilk and stool

BackgroundDNA methylation can be used to track cellular identity. We have previously developed a high-throughput, cost-effective DNA methylation pipeline containing two loci, HOXA3 and MAP4K1, that can quantify leukocyte proportion amongst a range of background tissues. Here, we apply this pipeline to two clinically relevant tissue samples: breastmilk and stool.ResultsWe report that our leukocyte methylation assay can quantify the proportion of leukocytes in breastmilk, and find leukocyte levels fluctuate dramatically in concert with infection severity. We benchmarked our leukocyte methylation pipeline in stool samples against the commonly used faecal calprotectin assay. Our results show a high concordance between the two methods indicating the viability of our DNA methylation biomarkers in the context of intestinal inflammation.Conclusion:The data presented here emphasise the clinical applicability of our high-throughput DNA methylation assay in the context of mastitis and intestinal inflammation

Evolution of the person census and the estimation of population counts in New Zealand, United Kingdom, Italy and Israel

A Census of a nation’s people and housing provides statistics about its health, income and social structures at a local level. While the demand for these statistics is unchanged the way they are collected is changing in many nations because of common drivers: cost pressure, web-based collection, decreasing response rates, environmental shocks and the availability of administrative data. Within this context, this paper gives an overview of the evolution of the Census in Israel, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and thereby provides an insight of the challenges and solutions of the modern Census

Nestedness of Ectoparasite-Vertebrate Host Networks

Determining the structure of ectoparasite-host networks will enable disease ecologists to better understand and predict the spread of vector-borne diseases. If these networks have consistent properties, then studying the structure of well-understood networks could lead to extrapolation of these properties to others, including those that support emerging pathogens. Borrowing a quantitative measure of network structure from studies of mutualistic relationships between plants and their pollinators, we analyzed 29 ectoparasite-vertebrate host networks—including three derived from molecular bloodmeal analysis of mosquito feeding patterns—using measures of nestedness to identify non-random interactions among species. We found significant nestedness in ectoparasite-vertebrate host lists for habitats ranging from tropical rainforests to polar environments. These networks showed non-random patterns of nesting, and did not differ significantly from published estimates of nestedness from mutualistic networks. Mutualistic and antagonistic networks appear to be organized similarly, with generalized ectoparasites interacting with hosts that attract many ectoparasites and more specialized ectoparasites usually interacting with these same “generalized” hosts. This finding has implications for understanding the network dynamics of vector-born pathogens. We suggest that nestedness (rather than random ectoparasite-host associations) can allow rapid transfer of pathogens throughout a network, and expand upon such concepts as the dilution effect, bridge vectors, and host switching in the context of nested ectoparasite-vertebrate host networks